# A Deep Sequential Model for Discourse Parsing on Multi-Party Dialogues

Source: [A Deep Sequential Model for Discourse Parsing on Multi-Party Dialogues](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa651a1e209131cea08555>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2026-01-01T12:44:35.697Z

Authors: Zhouxing Shi, Minlie Huang

Published: 2018-12-01T08:13:48.000Z

## Abstract

Discourse structures are beneficial for various NLP tasks such as dialogue understanding, question answering, sentiment analysis, and so on. This paper presents a deep sequential model for parsing discourse dependency structures of multi-party dialogues. The proposed model aims to construct a discourse dependency tree by predicting dependency relations and constructing the discourse structure jointly and alternately. It makes a sequential scan of the Elementary Discourse Units (EDUs) in a dialogue. For each EDU, the model decides to which previous EDU the current one should link and what the corresponding relation type is. The predicted link and relation type are then used to build the discourse structure incrementally with a structured encoder. During link prediction and relation classification, the model utilizes not only local information that represents the concerned EDUs, but also global information that encodes the EDU sequence and the discourse structure that is already built at the current step. Experiments show that the proposed model outperforms all the state-of-the-art baselines.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

- [Discourse Parsing on STAC Corpus](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/discourse-parsing-on-stac-corpus.md>): Discourse Parsing; STAC Corpus; Link F1: 73.2.

- [Conversational Discourse Parsing on STAC (test)](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/conversational-discourse-parsing-on-stac-test.md>): Conversational Discourse Parsing; STAC (test); Arc Score: 73.2.

- [Conversational Discourse Parsing on SPDPR (test)](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/conversational-discourse-parsing-on-spdpr-test.md>): Conversational Discourse Parsing; SPDPR (test); Arc Score: 83.

- [Dialogue Discourse Parsing on STAC in-domain (test)](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/dialogue-discourse-parsing-on-stac-in-domain-test.md>): Dialogue Discourse Parsing; STAC in-domain (test); UAS: 73.2.

- [Dialogue Discourse Parsing on Molweni in-domain (test)](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/dialogue-discourse-parsing-on-molweni-in-domain-test.md>): Dialogue Discourse Parsing; Molweni in-domain (test); UAS: 76.1.

- [Dialogue Discourse Parsing on STAC to Molweni cross-domain (test)](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/dialogue-discourse-parsing-on-stac-to-molweni-cross-domain-test.md>): Dialogue Discourse Parsing; STAC to Molweni cross-domain (test); UAS: 53.5.

- [Dialogue Discourse Parsing on Molweni to STAC cross-domain (test)](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/dialogue-discourse-parsing-on-molweni-to-stac-cross-domain-test.md>): Dialogue Discourse Parsing; Molweni to STAC cross-domain (test); UAS: 42.7.

- [Discourse Parsing on Molweni (test)](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/discourse-parsing-on-molweni-test.md>): Discourse Parsing; Molweni (test); Link (%): not recorded.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.00176>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.00176.pdf>)